Do Friendly NPC's Respawn?

But, what happens when a murderous bastard (read: me) comes along?

 

I'll +1 either having the NPC's respawn/reincarnate or being invulnerable+passive to mobs. As it is, pretty much any NPC outside of a dungeon/village is guaranteed to expire quickly against the infinite hordes of monsters. Kinda makes 'em pointless.

 

well you can murder his family and friends, just not the vendor himself.

It will be torturous enough for him knowing he lives forever and his family are pixel dust lmao

 

If you box the Merchant and yourself in dirt it won't be so difficult to make a transaction.

 

OR they could just lower the probability of merchant's ..etc. spawning in the open and instead spawn in little buildings or caves more

 

You mis-understand.

The npc in this case WAS in a building, but it was a building with an open roof so when the bird attacked he felt the need to run and assist his collegues.

I dont think they actually spawn outside, they are either lead out side, wander outside, or outside things wander inside to attack

 

Oh lol , funny thing is , there are even NPC's with a run and hide AI instead , seen quite a few random lone warriors cower from beats heh

 

haha

I did hit a vendor once who ran away to hide.

But moments later he realised that selling things was more important that his life... and promptly ran back! lawl

 

I don't like unkillable NPCs. What needs to happen is that they stop dying to monsters - why not make them invulnerable to monster damage or something? Allows people to remove them from the planet while making sure he doesn't die to the environment.

 

Where exactly is the functional difference between making NPCs invulnerable and making them respawn if they die? I don't want to settle on a planet and slowly see the local town get killed by animals each time I visit (because good luck stopping birds spawning off screen from doing that), until only the few lone traders remain.

 

No to both of these.

I will, at some point during my time on a planet, decide that it's time to initiate.. The Cleansing.
It'd just be awkward if they respawned at a later stage.

Not to mention how hard I'd abuse that for money/laughs.

 

I dunno why this is so funny to me. I love fun stories from people playing Starbound!

 

Differnet strokes I guess. Since I agree that I had not thoguht about deliberate killing, maybe one could tie NPCs to an item and make them respawn unless the item gets broken. Beds would be the obvious choice. Of course not all NPCs in a town currently have beds, but that is solveable.

I guess if guards were effective this would not be much of aproblem, but right now they are not. I watched one bird kill 2 guards and 3 villagers before being put down...

 

This discussion does remind me of the anomaly that Glitch are supposedly reassembled after 'death', but I've never seen a Glitch other than myself respawn.

 

Again, I'm just going to camp them for money/amusement.

Wait, what? I was in a village of Apex, and the only effective method of killing them was to release an Adam into their midst. Multiple bird attacks were thwarted (admittedly, and hilariously, many villagers died before the guard noticed.), but I dealt with pretty much all the guards with nothing but the starter equipment and a bow.
Guard aggro needs to be pretty crazy, in my opinion. I can't remember where I posted it, but I had an incident where I was murdering villagers, and they were against a window, screaming for the guard one floor below, outside, who calmly ignored these screams.

Guns seem about as effective as bows, seeing as I was just vaulting bullets from a high powered sniper rifle..


Edit: Someone conveniently liked the post in question:

 

Your over simplifying it. We arnt talking about ALL npc's we are only talking about the npc's which have a function.

There is no "functional" reason why all other passive npc's should re-spawn (expect mobs). Those NPC's are only there to give the impression of life, a community of real people. Guess what, real people always play Hardcore, when they die, they are dead.

Invulnerable NPC's break the illusion also? I hear you say..

The reason for making vendors and quest npcs invulnerable is because otherwise it breaks the game and prevents progression, which is more important than maintaining the illusion of life. got to maintain the balance between a good game and a rich vibrant universe, which is what gets people attached to games

Peronally I love the NPC's and never want to kill them and feel genuinly sad if somehow they manage to die on my watch. If they respawned it would shatter that completly. However I will also get completly mad if somehow the game breaks and I cant progress. See, Dev's need to do both

 

ii think we definitely need some kind of setting (on by default!) to prevent accidentally harming friendly NPCs

this can he handled quite elegantly. In one RPG i played a while back, you simply pressed H to toggle yourself between enemy-only, and indiscriminate attack mode. No choice is taken away from the player and you can still go on a murdering spreee if you want to.

But you should be unable to if you don't want to. Accidents happen.

 

heh Glad I don't live in the real world where infinite hordes of monsters insta-spawn just outside of my field of view. Single unarmed NPC's living in the wild against infinite hordes of creatures does not really mimic real life at all. It's an impossible odds situation, which I find difficult to become attached to. I'm not against the player killing NPC's, but there should be some kind of protection from mobs for at least all non-combat NPC's. Otherwise, infinite creatures that can attack vs single creature that can't attack is always going to end one way.

heh Prolly not a massive priority and certainly not a gamebreaker, but I'm not all that keen on exploring worlds full of empty homes.

 

I'd say a gradual respawn through a reproduction-esque mechanic would be the best option. Have settlements have a certain amount of NPCs they can support, which I figure must already be possible, as I've never seen an empty or packed village. Then, the settlement should respawn NPCs based on the actual population. If there's no NPCs left, or one on their own, they can't respawn. If there's at least two, they gradually respawn, with a higher rate for higher extant populations. That way, players can depopulate a settlement, but there's a defense against erspawning creatures.

Preferably, merchant spots and guard locations could co-opt existing cosmetic NPCs over time if their existing person dies.

 

What comes to pirateship vendor, and if you are worried that he might get killed, there is a solution. Go to folder where Starbound is installed, go to subfolder assets, npc:s, find "airshipquartermaster.npctype". Edit file with notepad, and search baseMaxHealth" : 40 and change value to like 500. I guarantee he wont die so easily anymore